E-governance: Karnataka state to award innovative and citizen-friendly ideas

The awards will come into effect from this financial year, as chief minister Siddaramaiah has announced them in 2016-17 state budgetSowmya Aji | ET Bureau | April 28, 2016, 07:32 IST

With the NDA government at the Centre underlining the importance of digital and e-governance, the Karnataka state government will be replicating the national awards given for innovative and citizen-friendly ideas that can be taken across the country.

Several Karnataka programmes, including mobile governance platform M-One and older projects like the Bhoomi land registration scheme, have been hailed by the Centre and marked for replication in other states.

"We want to promote more innovation in e-governance and make things easier for citizens. For this, we are instituting awards in different categories for which government departments and districts will compete," Rathan U Kelkar, chief executive officer, Centre for e-Governance, told ET.

The awards will come into effect from this financial year, as chief minister Siddaramaiah has announced them in 2016-17 state budget.

The chief minister said, "It is proposed to give awards to the different departments and institutions which are providing citizen-friendly e-gov schemes at state level."

Srikanth Nadamuni of the e-Governments Foundation said it was a great idea to encourage youngsters in coming up with e-Governance projects that can bring about greater transparency .

"If it is currently limited to government departments, that is not bad in itself. It will be great if they broaden that and everyone can participate. There is a lot of innovation going on and even startups do e-governance now," he told ET.

Kelkar said the only state giving such awards for e-governance innovation, till now, was Kerala. "Karnataka has been coming up with innovations, but these have not been given official recognition or encouraged through competition till now," he pointed out.

The state is studying both Kerala and the Centre to drawn up award categories and guidelines for applying. The government is also setting up a separate fund to provide financial assistance to new e-governance schemes at the district level.

Currently, the district level administration has no money to implement even simple projects like an app to monitor ongoing projects or verify accounts.